Organise your staff

Keeping your Freedom Fone service running requires staff or volunteers. It is common that people underestimate the work that is needed to manage the content, communicate with callers and monitor the usage of their Freedom Fone service. It is therefore best to plan from the start to have staff in at least two capacities: technical and operational.

Note: we know that budgets are often limited in organizations planning to provide a Freedom Fone service and the workloads for current staff is typically already high - adding the following tasks and resources may be too much. It should be pointed out that Freedom Fone can certainly be a part-time task for existing staff members if you are not able to dedicate full time staff to the service, however we recommend planning for success by freeing up staff and financial resources.

Duties

The following are some typical tasks that could be assigned to two different staff members involved in your Freedom Fone service:

Resources needed for your staff

In our experience, the operational staff in particular need the following resources to help them in managing the Freedom Fone service:

Mobile phone credit to coordinate with audience and information sources

Email and web access

Travel allowances to occasionally meet with audience and stakeholders

Simple audio recorder to gather interviews in the field

Computer access to conduct the following tasks:

Edit and produce audio menus

Check Leave-a-message recordings from callers

Check SMS

Try-and-see is probably the best approach to finding an efficient workflow with your staff and resources - with time you will know what you need to adjust to keep the service running. This will likely change over time as your service changes.